History

Nibbles: Vanilla, Maize vid, CIMMYT lines, Personal genebank, Fruit diversity

Trees help natural enemies of pests in vanilla plantations.
Cool video by Sherry Flint-Garcia on the history of maize. And its genetics.
CIMMYT releases a bunch of interesting maize pre-breeding products, though they don’t call them that.
Retired Turkish teacher starts seed bank.
Area man is really into fruits.

There’s a series of interactive workshops to gather feedback on how to measure the Global Burden of Crop Loss. I want an initiative on the Global Burden of Crop Diversity Loss though.
Soil data makes its way to Google Maps.
CONABIO has some really excellent agrobiodiversity posters and other resources. Calabazas and amaranth are just the start, so dig away on these orphan crops and others.
Speaking of digging, ancient people got high. Well there’s a shocker.
Speaking of shockers: huge literature review says researchers should get to grips with smallholders.

Podcast on Vavilov’s genebank.
What Vavilov’s genebank is up to at the moment with its melons.
Meanwhile, UK sets up a Crop Microbiome Cryobank.
How to breed apples.
Here’s how you can check if all of the above are free of the taint of white supremacy.

Biodiversity is insurance, says insurance company.
Especially biodiversity of fruits and vegetables.
Research by CGIAR into how best to use that insurance generates a 10:1 return on investment. Kind of. Covers breeding et al., but not genebanks. Sigh.
Professor Claire Kremen is awarded the Volvo Environment Prize 2020 for research on how to protect that insurance while feeding the world.
People have been fiddling with that insurance for longer than we thought, archeologists say.

The future is community seedbanks.
The past was crop mixtures. Among other things: two-year-old reviews of books on 18th century agriculture re-upped.
The future is trees. But they need help, hence these resources.
Australia looks to native tree seeds for its future. No help needed.
There will probably be a crop pandemic in the future. There have certainly been ones in the past. Even the recent past. Though plant pathogens do have their uses.
Turkish government seizes seized seeds from the past.
The future of swimming camels is uncertain.